Now she has five Maleficents as well as a horned headpiece, several picture books and a necklace. Mary McGrath, 7, of Metuchen, N.J., picked out her first Maleficent doll at 18 months. Though they represent a smaller part of the merchandising pie than the company’s juggernaut Disney Princess franchise, the Disney Villains brand includes toys and books of the Evil Queen from “Snow White,” Cruella de Vil (“101 Dalmatians”), Ursula (“The Little Mermaid”), Scar (“The Lion King”) and Captain Hook “Peter Pan.” We all have moments.”ĭisney has long acknowledged the appeal of its own darker characters. You can be really, really bitchy, and you can also be this other thing, a beautiful, loving person. “We aren’t always good,” Woolverton says. She also uses her magic for good, to protect her world, the Moors, and to help Aurora. Yes, she curses a baby, but that was a particularly bad day. Like Tony Soprano, this Maleficent has the potential for redemption. “But there has been a recognition over the last decade or so that the monsters are us, and we’d better face them.” “We’ve always had this tendency to project all the evil onto the barbarians and those who live in distant places and are very different from us,” says Maria Tatar, chair of the program in folklore and mythology at Harvard University.
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“The skeptical view is that there’s such a lack of great material out there they’re mining it for everything they’ve got out of desperation,” says Woolverton.īut Woolverton and others see a more significant cultural shift at work, with “Maleficent” the latest iteration of a process that has been unfolding for both male and female characters for years, as the line between villain and hero has blurred in stories as varied as the revisionist “Wizard of Oz” novel and Broadway show “Wicked” and the HBO mob drama series “The Sopranos.”
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Movie studios on a quest for recognizable brands have plundered the stock of traditional protagonists - Disney alone already owns Luke Skywalker, Captain America and Buzz Lightyear - so it might be tempting to ascribe Maleficent’s current moment to a hero shortage. Things change you, but you can change back.” Things happen to you, and you take them to heart. To me it’s more interesting to show all the facets of womankind. Who cares? We might as well just do the original movie. She can’t just be charging around being mean from the beginning to the end.
“What I was searching for was, what on earth happened in this woman’s life that she would be so driven to curse a baby?” Woolverton says. But, apart from her name, there’s little to indicate Maleficent’s dark future, until she experiences a wrenching and deeply metaphoric betrayal that hardens her. Introduced in the film as an awkwardly large, nature-loving fairy child, Maleficent doesn’t seem to fit in with the other fairies, particularly a trio of teeny flibbertigibbets played by Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville and Juno Temple. Nobody has to be who they profess to be.”
“I thought, ‘Well, what’s so good about him? Maybe he isn’t so good, looking at the whole thing upside down from her point of view. “The story says ‘Good King Stefan,’ ” Woolverton says.
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Sharlto Copley plays King Stefan, a much more complicated man than the “good king” of the original tale Elle Fanning is the ethereally beautiful and cursed Aurora and 14-year-old English actress Isobelle Molloy, from the British TV series “EastEnders,” is young Maleficent. The new film, written by “Alice in Wonderland” screenwriter Linda Woolverton and directed by “Alice” and “Avatar” production designer Robert Stromberg, presents a more sympathetic motivation for Maleficent’s cruelty. The 1959 Maleficent, with her pointy horns and voluminous black and purple cape, is essentially ticked off because she wasn’t invited to a baby shower. “Maleficent,” which arrives in theaters Friday, comes 55 years after Disney’s animated “Sleeping Beauty,” which presented a visually arresting but underdeveloped version of an evil mistress from fairy tales by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. like she had a secret, like something else was going on and you couldn’t get close enough to her to know what that was, and so she remained a mystery.” She was so elegant and so strong, and seemed to be having a great time. “When I was little, was like when you look at Marlene Dietrich for the first time.